The Book Shopper

Upping the Worm Game

As an amateur vermi-composter  – who has been raising worms for his own personal consumption for several years (that doesn’t sound quite right), I have recently been inspired to take my worm works operation to a new level. Heretofore I have been content with a simple, blue plastic tub, drilled with air holes and partially filled with red wiggler worms, selected food scraps, and newspaper. Shown here are the worms enjoying a print advertisement  promoting the Ernest Hemingway PBS documentary. Given the novelist’s fear of death, my worms appreciate the taste of irony, as much as avocado and melon rinds.

My renewed commitment began while I was browsing in the section of R.J. Ruppenthal’s Fresh Food from Small Places (2008), where he gives easy-to-follow instructions on how to build a simple worm operation for the home. Ruppenthal also does a shoutout for Amy Stewart’s The Earth Moved: On the Remarkable Achievements of Earthworms (2005), which he describes as “not a ‘how-to book’, but a reflection and synthesis of wisdom on the achievements of earthworms and their importance to human civilization.” Intrigued, I obtained a copy and started reading.

The Earth Moved

Stewart begins her book with a chapter on Charles Darwin, who studied worms with the same diligence exhibited during the naturalist’s famous voyage on the Beagle, which eventually led to his providing additional evidence to the theories of evolution.  Just before his death in 1882, Darwin captured this fascination with earthworms and their effects on enriching soil in his The Formation of Vegetable Mould, Through the Actions of Worms.  

Stewart goes on to explain how earthworms including the red wigglers or Eisenia fetida (as I now call them) work their magic on nematodes, coffee grounds, manure, bacteria, and fungi. Along the way I was able to glean tips on doing a better job with my bin full of critters.

Folded in throughout the book are interviews with researchers and “field trips” to places such an experimental sewage treatment plant in Pacifica, California where earthworms are part of the process of turning human waste into usable biosolids for agriculture. Along the way,  Stewart never loses her light-hearted anecdotal style that makes the book such a pleasure.  For example, in this passage she explains why she has not gone into the Big Worm business.

For one thing, I’d run into the same problem selling worm castings that I would if I were to go into the business selling chocolate or tawny port; I’d keep all the inventory for myself. I buy compost by the truckload for my annual mulching of the flower beds. I have to buy it because my worms only produce a few cubic feet of castings each season. If I had enough worms to generate truckloads of castings, my farm would still have only one customer: me.

I will take heed of Stewart's advice to limit my own personal consumption.

Worm Connoisseurs

Providing some additional inspiration and reflection on our natural world is Deborah Warren's short book of poems, Connoisseurs of Worms (2021). In her sixty-five poems Warren seamlessly mixes references to Greek mythology, classical paintings, as well as modern life (one poem is even entitled "PETscan"). She deeps dives into all creatures great and small, ranging from zebras, "Titian-haired" orangutans, to moles and a worm dietary favorite - nematodes. A good example of how she can work these seemingly disparate themes into one poem is demonstrated in "Mosquito in the Heart."

 

Mosquito in the Heart

There's nothing viable on the EKG.

So says the cardiologist.

Wrong. Clearly he missed

some small anomaly:

 

With an incessant and insistent hiss

under my left ribs—a falsetto whine,

whetting its proboscis,

it flits and ricochets around my heart.

 

The doctor's diagnosis?

He'd call it a feint of heart—if he had the wit:

He doesn't. He's just content to be smart,

and here's his opinion: It's anxiety.

It isn't in your heart—it's in your mind.

There's medication; often meditation

helps with tension. And he won't admit

that coronary insects do exist.

 

Just paranoia? I'm not buying it:

He'll give me white lies but—when I insist—

refer me to Cardioentomology.

You don't have to be a vermi-composter to appreciate her wit and small wisdoms. Just someone who can take time out to examine life all around us, including what is beneath our feet. 

 

Conspiracies Explained

The Gravity’s Rainbow Support Group (GRSG), is a two-member book club/duo made up a college friend of 50 years and yours truly. Founded during the first months of the Pandemic, the GRSG’s first book was Thomas Pynchon’s 1973 novel Gravity’s Rainbow.

In the three years we have read over 30 books together ranging from classics like Tristram Shandy and The Odyssey to historical tomes such as Barbara Tuchman’s Stillwell and the American Experience in China (1971). We recently finished Colin Dickey’s Under the Eye of Power: How Fear of Secret Societies Shapes American Democracy (2023).

Dickey begins his book about the Freemasons in England and France and their influence in the American colonies. Both Ben Franklin and George Washington were supporters of Masonry. Dickey writes that “Rather than a shadowy organization pulling strings behind the scenes, the Freemasons of the eighteenth century were a prominent, public group who sought to display their power and clout in the open streets.”   (Masonic buildings still dot some town and city landscapes like this one in my home town of Decatur, Georgia.)

The book gains momentum as the Civil War approaches.

Dickey points out how the abolitionists of the North used conspiracy theories to taint the Southerners and likewise how the Southerners used conspiracy theories to strike fear and defend being slave owners. Many Northerners complained that free slave labor gave the Southerners an "unfair" economic advantage. This feeling was especially true in agrarian Midwest.

One of the more ridiculous arguments was made by the future 10th President of the United States John Tyler who argued that the abolitionists "were not ‘friends’ to enslaved Americans but instead their 'enemies' since their agitations drove enslavers to crack down on those in bondage." This sounds as idiotic as the current Florida governor Ron DeSantis redefining slavery as on the job training.

Dickey's breakdown of the different eras of the Ku Klux Klan include the marketing strategy of merchandising of robes and hoods in the 1920s. This along with KKK's membership model which was basically a pyramid scheme is nothing short of eye opening. 

Towards the end of the book, Dickey gives us examples of how conspiracies and the belief that secret societies and cabals control our society, but he relates them to the current political landscape of Donald Trump, QAnon, January 6th rioters, militias, and replacement theorists. He explains why they endure:

"The morass of global politics is difficult to understand and unpredictable even to experts but conspiracy theories off a straightforward explanation that cuts through all that. They suture all available facts together and do the work of organizing the chaos of history into an explainable, overarching theory."

Coincidently those of at GRSG know only too well that one of major themes in Pynchon’s novels like Gravity’s Rainbow and The Crying of Lot 49 (1966), is that paranoia conveniently provides some kind of framework to explain our world. 

The Next Step

The CRSG thought this book was a worthwhile read for all its American history alone, but the author does seem have a point of view (not necessarily an agenda). It’s not a gospel, but it can be the familiar first step, to an education. "DO THE RESEARCH," as they say.

Kundera: A Final Review

My first thought when reading The New York Times obituary on the Czech ex-pat novelist Milan Kundera (1929-2023) is that if you live and write for decades, not every reader or critic is going to admire your work. (In the obit, he is described as brilliant, witty, with "his poetically prizefighterish* looks, a misogynist, and a traitor to his country, etc.) Of course, if you have read enough of him, I think his rebuttal to these judgments would be an impolite version of "I don't care what you think, idiot."

That's why I never expected a thank you for including him in The Book Shopper's pantheon of notable writers in the chapter, "What Every Good (Used) Bookstore Should Have." In this chapter I included a rundown of contemporary writers I would use to measure the quality of any secondhand book shop I visited. The list in alphabetical order includes: Pat Barker, Julian Barnes, T.C. Boyle, Bruce Duffy, Ian Frazier, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Jim Harrison, Oscar Hijuelos, Mary Karr, Maxine Hong Kingston, Milan Kundera, Alice McDermott, and E. Annie Proulx.  

In the The Book Shopper (pages 98-101) I gave a rundown of some of his works including a slap-on-the-wrist for recommending an Unbearable Lightness of Being, which after rereading years later I described as "overwrought." The movie version was even worse. As a humorist, I placed Kundera on the funny spectrum next to Alexander Solzhenitsyn. 

No wonder he never expressed any appreciation for making my list.

Still, I have a soft spot for him. I read a lot of his books and I still carry two quotes of his forever in my head, which originated with him and that counts. They both come from the book The Art of the Novel and the chapter entitled "Sixty-Three Words":

One the terms is the "Union of Soviet Socialist Republics" (U.S.S.R.), which he describes as "four words, four lies. " **

The second term is that we live on the Planet of Inexperience. 

We are born one time only, we can never start a new life equipped with the experience we’ve gained from the previous one. We leave childhood without knowing what youth is, we marry without knowing what it is to be married, and even when we enter old age, we don’t know what it is we’re heading for: the old are innocent children of their own age. In that sense, man’s world is the planet of inexperience.

---

* The description of "prizefighterish good looks" from a character in Philip Roth's The Human Stain who sees Kundera at a book event.  

** Kundera acknowledges that "four words, four lies" originated from the Greek-French philosopher Cornelius Castoriadis.

The Force Is Always With You

What do binder clips, ballpoint pens, tape measures, can openers and large bridges (like the Navajo Bridge in northern Arizona) have in common? They are all part of the invisible world of forces that impact our daily lives, and they are discussed in Henry Petroski's Force: What It Means to Push and Pull, Slip and Grip, Start and Stop (2022).

Force examines a host of scientific, physical, and mathematical topics without burying us in technical jargon. Petrosky mixes anecdotes about his life extending back to his childhood playing with the Tricky Dog dog magnet (Chapter 2 - Magnetism) or in Chapter 13 when he reminisces about watching a clerk in a bakery slice a loaf of bread and then flawlessly place it inside a plastic bag (pg. 164). He writes:

"The clearance between the contents and container appeared to be as tight as a piston in a cylinder. She left the bag open, lest the fresh bread be crushed in the course of closing it. She did not have to be so careful with a loaf of rye bread because its crust gave it both stiffness and strength to resist. Watching the whole seamless process and imagining the forces involved was to me the greatest thing since sliced bread itself."

Reading Force will change how one looks at some of the simplest objects like the binder clip and ballpoint pen (Chapter 12 - Stretching and Squeezing), the can opener (Chapter 6, - Lever, Lever, Cantilever), and the tape measure (Chapter 14 - Deployable Structures). You will even feel a little better about yourself when you learn that your fingerprints wear thinner and lose some of their tactile qualities, which explains why I drop more objects (like pens, clips, and tape measures) than I used to. 

This doesn't mean that Petrosky doesn't tackle bigger engineering feats like bridges, arches and domes, and obelisks. As he describes the reasons behind famous bridge collapses you may be thankful that bridge repair is part of the Federal infrastructure plan. 

 

Filling the Sports Void

Let's face it we're sick of football. College basketball really doesn't start until March; pro basketball until mid-April. As for my favorite sport baseball, I refuse to fill up on empty Spring Training calories before Opening Day. This leaves a big sports void in the month of February and I usually fill it with a good baseball book, but this year things worked out a little differently. By consensus our two-person book group, selected a sports/history book to kickoff 2023—David Maraniss’s  Path Lit by Lightning: The Story of Jim Thorpe (2022).

If you are like me, you were probably familiar with the Thorpe name as some great athlete who played sports early in the 20th Century, residing in the black-and-white team photograph corner of your mind.  Reading Maraniss’s detailed biography of Thorpe’s life changed all that. I can now pick Thorpe out of this picture of the Carlisle Indians football team (middle row, third from the right).

Football Days

Thorpe was born in 1887 on a Sac and Fox reservation near Prague Oklahoma, twenty years before Oklahoma became a state. When he was 17, Thorpe was sent to the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Carlisle, Pennsylvania and ended up playing football for the legendary (albeit somewhat undeserving) Pop Warner in 1907 (top row, wearing a suit). In the early days of football, Carlisle, though it was not a college, played many of the college power houses of the time: Army, Penn, Harvard and Pitt. In 1912 they finished with a 9-1-1 record including an historically significant victory against Army (the pre-game pep talk where Warner reminded his team what the U.S. Army had done to their ancestors). In the game Thorpe was knocked cold by future president Dwight D. Eisenhower. Since there was no such thing as concussion protocol then, Thorpe later returned to the game.  

At Carlisle, Thorpe was also introduced to track and field, which matched well with his overall athleticism. By today’s standards he was not that big —about 175-185 pounds, but he was all muscle, speed, toughness, and agility. Thorpe represented America in the pentathlon and decathlon in the 1912 Olympics in Stockholm where he won two gold medals. (Maraniss points out that ironically, even though Thorpe was a Native American he had to sign a form that he was an American before competing.)   Sadly, within a year he was stripped of those medals because he had been paid as a professional minor league baseball player. Later Thorpe played 269 games in six seasons at the major league level, mostly for the New York Giants, but this clip from Total Baseball confirms that he had trouble hitting the curveball.

Thorpe was prominent in the early history of professional football along with the likes of Red Grange and George Halas. He was the league's first president, though mostly because of his athletic fame.

More than Sports

Although the first half of the Path Lit is about the early days of the Olympics, football and some baseball, the book is also about the politics and policies of assimilation, racism towards Native Americans, and several chapters on life in Hollywood in late 40s and early 50s. In 1951, Burt Lancaster starred in a movie made about Thorpe's life.  Michael Curtiz of Casablanca fame directed it. 

But Thorpe had many troubles. Maraniss summarizes them all: "his struggles with alcohol, his nomadic lifestyle, his Sisyphean cycle of finding and losing jobs, his bad luck and mistreatment, his [three] dysfunctional marriages, his time away from his sons and daughters when they were young.” However, despite their difficult upbringings Thorpe's children grew up to become military officers, government workers, college graduates, and Native American activists. 

Maraniss is evenhanded in his biography neither completely blaming Thorpe or the white-dominated society for Thorpes woes nor completely absolving either of them.  It's complicated and that is one of the strengths of the book is Maraniss has taken great effort to put the athlete's life in historical context. (It's one of the weaknesses too -- sometime too much detail.). Perhaps Thorpe summed up his own life best when he said after having his medals unjustly taken away, "Once I had made up my mind to face the world with the truth, I was no longer worried about the matter. I adopted a fatalistic viewpoint and considered the episode just another event on the red man's life of ups and downs.'

Jim Thorpe died in a trailer park in California from a heart attack in 1953, but the news traveled around the world as fast as communications would allow. After all, just a few years earlier in 1950, sportswriters from the Associated Press voted him by a wide margin the Greatest Athlete in the first half of the 20th century, 

Thorpe had quite a sports career and a life, which provided Maraniss with more than enough material to fill my reading off- season.

 

Mushroom Anthropology Notes

On The Book Shopper's companion blog there is my brief review of Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing's The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins (2015). It is entitled "Mushroom Induced Reading." 

Or you can take a peek at my reading notes (which are kind of like an index). Click on image of the notes if you wish to enlarge the "fine" print. 

Guest Posting: Anais Nin and Henry Miller

Preface: This posting comes from my longtime friend Dave Dintenfass who lives in Seattle. Our friendship dates back to 1979 while I was training to be a board operator at public radio station WILL in Champaign-Urbana Illinois. Dave was a student who was assigned to train me on the night and weekend shifts. (One advantage of those late hours is that I was paid to read while listening to classical music.) 

Dave has influenced my writing, my taste in books and my passion for book shopping throughout the decades. He offered to share his recent thoughts on revisiting Anaïs Nin and Henry Miller. It reminds me of the kind of conversations we have had about books.  Dave writes:

I finished Anaïs Nin: A Biography by Diedre Bair (Penguin Books, 1995). This was a borrow from one of the ubiquitous Free Little Library kiosks here in Seattle.

A bit of a slog given its length but very well written and comprehensive in the way that most biographies are not. Of course, there was the benefit of access to the famous diaries so documenting the life of perhaps one of the most outrageously narcissistic literary figures wasn't quite the challenge that you might assume. Or perhaps the challenge here was not for lack of research material but rather for an overwhelmingly generous supply of it. Accordingly, a comprehensive biography like this is not small. Did I mention the book is nearly 700 pages?

I felt Ms. Bair really tried to remain neutral about her subject despite meticulous evidence of just how unpleasant Anaïs Nin was. We are examining the life here of a spoiled, manipulative, monumentally self-absorbed woman—a pathological liar and completely ungenerous person who was clearly morally untethered in just about every regard. Anaïs Nin was clearly her own worst enemy but to her credit, she was not afraid to detail it all in her infamous diaries.

Like most of us, I only knew of her work by association with Henry Miller (which actually was only a very brief time in the Paris of the early 1930s) and some of the works only available posthumously (including The Delta of Venus). I did check out some of her short fiction published during her lifetime (from archive.org) and I have to say, while these short pieces were beautifully written, they lack any sort of compelling story, and they seem actually rather shallow and utterly bereft of any humanity. But then I feel the same way about Lawrence Durrell's fiction—it remains a mystery to me why it is so highly praised; I find it incomprehensible. But Your Mileage May Vary. 

All this encouraged me to re-read Tropic of Cancer as it's been many years since I read any Henry Miller. I could say this 1934 novel hasn't held up but after reading it again 45 years later, it's clear to me it didn't hold up the first time I read it. Notwithstanding the long interval between readings, I vividly recall that my youthful impression was the same as now. Despite occasional flashes of dark humor and playful narrative, the book is much too long (over 300 pages in the Castle Books reprint of the famous 1961 Grove edition) and even more rambling and unfocused than The Great White Whale of my literary interest, Saul Bellow's The Adventures of Augie March. (I'm not suggesting here any other equivalence between these two works, just that the Bellow book captivated my interest for years until I had the misfortune to finally read the thing from end-to-end with great disappointment.)

If Miller had boiled it down to 30 or 40 of the best pages, it might be viewed today as a compelling (though youthfully immature) riff on impoverished bohemian aimlessness in depression-era Paris. Curiously, it's when the narrator leaves Paris near the end of the novel (to teach English at a parochial school in Dijon) that some of the most focused and insightful writing emerges. In fact, I would suggest the last 50 pages of the book are probably its best.

I might revisit Miller’s other infamous early work, Tropic of Capricorn, written a few years after Cancer. When I last read it 45 years ago, I recalled it was a much better book. I’m not so sure now but it’s worth a go.

 Thanks, Dave, for thinking of the blog and recommending to me which books to read and avoid.

My History with the Dos Passos Trilogy

The first thing that captured my imagination about the Dos Passos's U.S.A. Trilogy was the clever artwork of the Signet Classics, which were prominently displayed in the bookstores of my college youth. I finally bought them, and they stayed on my shelves for a number of years. I do not recall when I finally read them, but I did it over a period of years, probably during the 1990s. 

The Signet Classics were notable because they each contained an introduction by writer and literary critic Alfred Kazin, who summarized the three books of the trilogy —The 42nd Parallel (1930), 1919 (1932), and The Big Money (1936)— as a portrayal of America before it became a superpower. We grew up thinking of America as that way, but Kazin reminds us that America was a raw and often brutal country in the first quarter of the 20th century. (To better understand significance of Dos Passos's work, check out the essay by James Mustich, author of 1000 Books to Read Before You Die, E Pluribus Unum. On John Dos Passos's U.S.A.)

Kazin writes that Dos Passos shows how the rich men of America (characterized by J. P. Morgan) controlled the lives of working men and women. The average man or woman didn't have a chance against the "mass culture, mass superstition and mass slogans" perpetrated by the powerful.

Another memorable aspect of the Signet Classics is that they were illustrated by Reginald Marsh (1898-1954) who drew for The New Yorker in the 1920s but went on to become an artist of some renown and a contemporary of the more well-known Thomas Hart Benton.  Marsh was known for his "depictions of life in New York City in the 1920s and 30s." (Wikipedia). A sample of Marsh's work graces the cover of earlier paperbacks, shown at the left.

Flashback and Flashforward - 192 Books

In September 2014, my partner Denise and I did a self-guided bookstore tour in the Chelsea section of New York City, which I wrote about in the posting Chelsea Lit Crawl. 

Usually if I like a new bookstore, I will make an effort to purchase something and at 192 Books, I bought the Library of America edition of the U.S.A. trilogy, which wrapped Dos Passo's work into a single volume. I replaced my tattered paperbacks. not knowing whether I would ever pick it up again and reread it.

For those not familiar with the Library of America, it is a nonprofit publisher championed by critic Edmund Wilson (1895 - 1974), which published its first book in 1982.  LOA has since then published 300 volumes of works ranging from poetry, novels, crime writing, science fiction, essays and journalism.

This summer our GRSG book (support) group selected The 42nd Parallel— partly I suspect because I had this book waiting on my shelf. Since the LOA edition is printed on "premium acid-free lightweight opaque paper that...will not turn yellow or brittle for centuries," the book was in mint condition.  The Smyth-sewn bindings also ensured "that the books open easily and lie flat without crinkling or buckling." 

Though I miss the Kazin commentary and the Reginald Marsh artwork of the Signet paperbacks, this edition more than makes up for it because it includes a Dos Passos's biographical timeline, a chronology of world events, and some annotation (including timely translations of some French phrases). All helpful because the U.S.A. trilogy is a history of America, which included many characters galivanting around Europe during the first World War. (The characters in 1919 spend their time in the Parisian and Italian cafés far away from the front.)

I am not sure that Dos Passos is for everybody but if you look at some of LOA's other offerings, I am sure you can find something of interest. And don't worry, you don't have to read it right away.

Just a sample

 

 

Inside Grant’s Tome

Our book group has just finished reading Ron Chernow’s voluminous biography Grant (2017), which illuminated a period of American history that we knew little about.  Chernow uses the life of Ulysses S. Grant (1822-1888) to give us perspectives on the Mexican War, the coming storm between the North and the South, the Civil War, and the continued strife and violence against blacks who were denied their full rights for decades after the war.

Heretofore, Grant was perhaps best known for two things: the Union General who defeated Robert E. Lee ending the Civil War only because he had superior numbers and resources and secondly, as the two-term 18th President of the United States whose administration was embroiled in corruption and scandal.

Chernow dispels both of these harsh judgements. Although in the early part of his life “Grant had been a failure, battered by life at every turn,” his life changed as dramatically as if it were a fairytale.  An 1843 graduate of West Point Grant served in the Mexican War but left the military in 1854 under duress.  As an unsuccessful businessman mostly because he was susceptible to being duped, he was barely able to support his family. Suffering from alcoholic binges did not make things any easier. When the Civil War broke out in 1860, he was a shopkeeper in Galena, Illinois. Eight years later he was a war hero and President of the United States.

General Grant

Unlike Lee who was tactician in battle, Grant was a strategist who led the Union to early victories at Fort Donelson, Fort Henry, (Shiloh not so much) and then went on to capture Vicksburg in 1863—a campaign rated by military historians “a masterpiece, the preeminent campaign waged by any general during the war.” His army suffered horrible losses against Lee in Virginia in the summer of 1864, where he was called "Grant the Butcher" by northern critics.  Eventually he cornered Lee in an untenable defensive position that ultimately led to the end of the war. Chernow writes:

“Grant was the strategic genius produced by the Civil War. He set clear goals, communicated them forcefully, and instilled them in his men. While Lee stuck to Virginia, Grant grasped the war in its totality, masterminding the movements of all Union armies (including Sherman’s).  It was Grant who best apprehended the strategic interactions of the eastern and western theatre.”

President Grant

Unfortunately, the corruption and scandal of Grant’s presidency overshadowed his relentless efforts to give newly freed blacks not only the right to vote, but the ability to do so without risking their lives. Chernow does not gloss over the scandals, but he establishes that it wasn’t Grant who was corrupt himself.  But Grant had major flaw in trusting the wrong people who took advantage of him throughout his life (unlike his alcoholism which he controlled through total abstinence).

An abolitionist before the war (more so than Abraham Lincoln) Grant was a fervent believer that blacks should be able to vote without intimidation, hold office and during his first term he enacted laws to strengthen the rights to vote.  He used Federal troops to disembowel the nascent Ku Klux Klan “unquestionably the worst outbreak of domestic terrorism in American History” writes Chernow, and he created the Department of Justice to indict and convict over a thousand Klansman.  (A reincarnation of the Klan was formed in the 1920s.) In other words, there was only a short period of reprieve before the white Southerners and Democrat power structure formed new militant groups. This coupled with Northern “Reconstruction fatigue” led the evaporation of voting rights for blacks. (During Lincoln and Grant's tenure it was the Republicans who were the champions of Reconstruction and securing the rights of blacks. The Democrats where the party of the white Southerners who had no intention to succumbing to new order proposed by Lincoln.)

Chernow maintains that it would be another 96 years after Grant (1968) that another fair election would be held in many parts of the South.  “Slavery had been abolished,” writes Chernow, “but it had been replaced by a caste-ridden form of second-class citizenship for southern blacks, and that counted as a national shame.”

Post Presidency

 After serving two terms in office Grant made a two-year world tour, but upon his return stateside failed to win the Republican party's nomination in 1880. At the end of his life, he was swindled in a Ponzi scheme that left him penniless. Moreover, he soon he was in declining in health from throat cancer. Fortunately, an important writer and publisher of the time—Mark Twain—understood that he could restore Grant’s wealth by publishing the general’s memoirs. While in intense pain, Grant finished his two volume Personal Memoirs just a month before his death and it eventually sold 300,000 copies which provided Grant's devoted wife Julia with generous royalties.

More About the Book Group

In the spirit of transparency. our book group—consists of just two people (easy to schedule get togethers and everyone reads the book!) and it began in the summer of 2020 as a way for two college chums and new retirees to "support" each other to read challenging books and avoid inflicting our "intellectual" chatter on loved ones. Our first book was Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow and have just finished Chernow. We keep notes, ramblings, observations, (sometimes irreverent like a comparison between Ulysses S. Grant and Donald Trump) on our discussion board available here (but you must scroll down).

And you can order the book Grant from our blog partner Destination: Books.

Life Under Totalitarianism

For a better understanding for what life is like under totalitarianism (and what the Ukrainians are fighting for/against) check out the works of Josef Škvoreckؘý (1924-2012). I just finished reading two of his novellas Emὃke (1963, tr. 1977) and The Bass Saxophone (1967, tr. 1977), which are combined in a single volume with an introductory piece "Red Music." Škvoreckؘý played saxophone with a jazz group Red Music growing up in Czechoslovakia. In 1968, the Soviets removed the Czech reformist government with an invasion of a half-a-million troops, crushing the budding Prague Spring. Škvoreckؘý and his wife emigrated to Canada where he became a professor and started a publishing company that made the works of banned Czech writers available throughout the world and to his fellow countryman.

This is not the first time I have read the prolific Škvoreckؘý.  When my partner Denise and I were in the Czech Republic in the fall of 2019 on vacation, I took a copy of his short detective novel The End of Lieutenant Bovurka (1975) with me. After reading it and I picked up a copy The Return of Lieutenant Bovurka (1991) at the English language bookstore Shakespeare near the Franz Kafka Museum. In each book the melancholic detective Bovurka must walk a tightrope of solving crimes and resisting the Communist regime. These books reinforced the sentiment expressed by our middle-aged tour guide over drafts of Pilsner Urquell as he described the suppression in Czechoslovakia under the Soviet Union in the 1970s and 1980s. 

The Memorial to the Victims of Communism (shown above) in the Lesser Town Area of Prague serves as a reminder who disappeared during the Soviet regime.

Last fall when I went to Germany (the former East German cities of Cottbus and Dresden) to visit my older daughter Cynthia, I took a copy of Škvoreckؘý’s most well-known work the voluminous The Engineer of Human Souls (1977, tr. 1984) The narrator Danny Smiricky (considered Škvoreckؘý’s alter-ego in many of his novels – like Philip Roth’s Zuckerman) has emigrated from Czechoslovakia and is a professor in Toronto. Smiricky mixes his recollections of living under German occupation with ex-pats in Canada wrestling with their guilt in leaving Europe.  Because of all the characters and the time switches, the book is a challenging read and I’ll admit I did not finish it. (More my shortcoming than the book’s).

Despite the grim settings of oppression under totalitarian regimes, there is an element of humor/absurdity in his many of writings and in the links below there is a prime example from The Bass Saxophone.

Related Links

 A lengthy tribute to Škvoreckؘý from Paul Wilson in the Guardian who translated The Engineer of Human Souls to English. (Its title refers to Stalin's description of writers),

A Škvoreckؘý passage from the introduction to The Bass Saxophone listing the Nazis 10 Rules to Combat Jazz.  Note: The best way to buy this out-of-print book is through Alibris. Make sure you get the copy that includes the Introductory "Red Music". The easiest way to get the correct copy is type the ISBN number 0-671-55681-9 in the search bar at Alibris Books.

And The Book Shopper Blog has a couple of postings that mention similar books. “In Best Books Read of 2019"I write about sending a book about Trump’s impending impeachment over the Ukraine scandal to then Georgia Senator David Perdue.  Another posting "Tyranny, Voting and Making Love for the Last Time" is a shoutout to Timothy Snyder’s book On Tyranny (2017). (Since then, a graphic version of the book is available at Destination: Books, a reluctantly proud blog sponsor.)

Be vigilant, especially here in Georgia where they have made it much more difficult to vote.

Two Different Travel Books

This month I have read two travel books, neither of which you would find on the shelf next to your Fodors, Lonely Planets, or Anthony Bourdains. Both books are not your normal travel fanfare.

Norman Lock’s A Boy in His Winter: An American Novel (2014) is an imaginative revisiting of Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. In Part One (July 2, 1835 to August 29, 2005), the narrator Huck Finn travels down the Mississippi River with his companion the slave Jim, but the two are stuck in a time warp where they don’t age even though the voyage itself lasts for decades. Off the river, time has marched on, as Huck and Jim witness a Civil War battle at Vicksburg, and later meet a veteran of the Great War. Tom Sawyer makes a few cameo appearances along the way but unlike Huck or Jim, Tom grows older.

While Huck and Jim are traveling companions, they are not close friends because of the chasm of race. Jim knows that a black man in the South lives in peril and it is something that the youthful Huck in his ignorance doesn’t understand. In one instance, Huck asks:

“ 'Jim, do you believe in free will?'

'Is there a more ridiculous question to ask a slave?' he said, laughing.

And for a moment I hated him."

In the second part (August, 29, 2005 to September 11, 2005) Huck arrives at the mouth of the river south of New Orleans the same day as hurricane Katrina. His raft is gone (and so is Jim) and he joins a three-man crew of a charter boat who are running drugs from New Orleans up the Atlantic coast during the post-Katrina chaos. Lock is able to capture how a thirteen-year-old boy views the 21st century, who is both innocent yet worldly enough to survive. In Part 3 (September 12, 2005 to March 15, 2077) Huck, since he is no longer tied to the river, is beginning to age and the old Huck reflects more on his young life.  Hence the title A Boy in His Winter.

It's an unusual premise, and I am usually skeptical of derivative works (like sequels, prequels), but Lock who has reimagined several other American classics in his The American Novel series (all with Bellevue Literary Press) writes well taking on a time-traveling Huckleberry Finn adventure.

Remembering Turkey

The other book is Michael Pereira’s Mountains and a Shore: A Journey Through Southern Turkey. Originally published in 1966, Paul Dry Books republished the book in 2015. In this thin travelogue, Pereira combines the history of the country with his solo travels along the southern Mediterranean coastline and Taurus Mountains. Because Pereira speaks Turkish and insists on traveling the way that the locals do: by foot, by donkey if necessary, and the most common mode of transportation— the bus. He writes:

“…the role played by buses is of immense importance, and I came away with nothing but admiration for them and their drivers. For they have to contend with the trains, bridges washed away or simply non-existent, and, by no means the least, other Turkish drivers.

To help them overcome these hazards they very reasonably enlist the help of the Almighty, and in the space above the windscreen is always written some brief prayer or exhortation. Some of these are pious rather than comforting, such as: ‘May God protect you!’ and others, to my mind, needlessly eschatological: ‘Forget not thy God!’… The most popular of all, however, is the single word ‘Maşallah’, which used in much the same way as a Spaniard uses the sign of the cross to avert danger.”

You feel every bump in the road as he travels the mountainous swerving roads often overlooking the Mediterranean. Pereira’s purposely traveled to an area of a country that he believed would be much more developed in the upcoming decades.

His descriptions of the kebabs, and the centuries-old churches and muezzins’ calls to prayers from the minarets reminded me of my trip to Turkey with my partner Denise in 201o. Books like Pereira’s expand what I normally think of as a travel book. Sometimes you read a travel book with a purpose to plan an upcoming trip or to be a companion while traveling, but Mountains and A Shore, provided a respite from our daily routine by reliving memories of our trip to this fascinating country. (I cannot forget our visit to the Hagia Sophia and the pickle shop in Istanbul.)

It is just as Dave Mason wrote in the Forward to Pereira’s book: “All travel is time travel.”

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